The artist as such aims at self-expression for its own sake. It is a necessity of his nature, an outpouring of pent-up feeling, as much as is the song of the lark. Of course we are speaking of the true creative artist, and not of the laborious copyist. If he subordinates his work as a means to some further end; if his aim is morality or immorality, truth or error, pleasure or pain; if it is anything else than the embodiment or utterance of his own soul, so far he is acting riot as an artist, but as a minister of morality, or truth, or pleasure, or their contraries. If we keep this idea steadily in view, we can see how much truth, or how little, is contained in the various theories of fine art which have been advanced from the earliest times. We can see how truly art is a [Greek: mimaesis] an imitating of realities; not that art-objects are, as Plato supposes, faint and defective representations, vicegerent species of the external world, whose beauty is but the transfer and dim reflection of the beauty of nature. Were it so, then the mirror, or the camera, were the best of all artists. As expression, fine art is the imitation of the soul within; of outward realities as received into the mind and heart of the artist, in their ideal and emotional setting. The artist gives word or expression to what he sees; but what he sees is within him. His work is self-expression. We can from this infer where to look for a solution of the controversy between idealism and realism. We can also see how, owing to the essential disproportion between the material and sensible media of expression which art uses, and the immaterial and spiritual realities it would body forth, its utterances must always be symbolic, never literal. We can see how needlessly they embarrass themselves who deny the name of fine art to any work whose theme is not beautiful, or which is not morally didactic. Finally, we can see that if fine art be but an extension of language, there can be no immediate connection between art as art, and general moral character; no more reason for supposing that skilful and beautiful self-utterance is incompatible with immorality, than that its absence is incompatible with sanctity.